[triangle-zpug] Plone Jams

[Chris Calloway]

Mark and I talked offline about the follow-up to the last "Plone Tips" 
TriZPUG meeting. The idea has been to put more "Z and P" in TriZPUG 
meetings and take some of the fervent Plone activity, not out of 
TriZPUG, but into additional TriZPUG meetings where newcomers wouldn't 
be freaked out by the intensity of all the Plone activity. Not that we 
couldn't talk about Plone at regular TriZPUG meetings anymore. But just 
let some of the excess Plone pressure out of the cooker.

We'd dubbed this "Plone Jam" in previous attempt where I dropped the 
ball on the meeting place for the designated day back in August, I 
think. We're going to try it again.

The idea is sort of an "un-sprint." That is the topic is what you show 
up with to work on rather than a pre-planned theme. And we may work on 
our own things side by side for synergistic effect or we may work in 
teams/pairs like sprint; it's up to the individuals how to work together 
at each Jam. You can bring a problem you are trying to solve at work. 
You can bring a pet project. You can bring something you are playing 
around with. You can make a presentation. You can just work on your 
code. It's a Jam: it's improvisational. Plone at the Improv. Just play 
and see what comes out. See if a groove develops. Several TriZPUGers are 
already grooving on their common approach to Plone integration and want 
to share the love.

I'm coming into this with a sweet meeting space on the UNC campus: a 
deluxe conference room with a huge picture window view on the 4th floor 
of my new building. It has a giant screen laptop projector and a large 
LCD display at either end. It has a gianormous conference table. It has 
GigE pipes. It has nice restrooms. It has a kitchen with a frig and 
sink. It's fairly private and secluded. The parking situation is the 
same as when we meet in Phillips Hall (that is, Swain Lot for a modest 
fee, around $1/hour). In fact, to get to this room you will enter 
through Phillips Hall and walk through a sky bridge at the rear of the 
building into brand new Chapman Hall (so new it's not even on campus 
maps yet).

Mark suggested we meet every other week on days not overlapping regular 
TriZPUG meetings. That sort of scares me except the CharPy group has 
been having regular meetings every other week with no lack of steam. In 
fact, meeting every other week seems to be energizing them.

In order to accommodate this, I have two requests for feedback:

1) The building this Jam would meet in locks at 7pm. Would you be 
opposed to meeting at 6pm? Then anyone who is an hour or more late can 
call me to be let in. If we jammed for two hours, this would also get us 
out at 8pm for a bite to eat instead of when most places to eat have 
already stopped serving.

2) TriZPUG used to meet on Wednesdays. We moved the meetings to Tuesdays 
to accommodate a request from a regular member. This member has 
indicated he would not be unopposed to now moving the night back to 
Wednesdays. However, this is not what I'm asking. I'm asking if it would 
be OK to have Plone Jams on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. 
This is because a community organization to which I belong, and try to 
get as many other people to join as possible, has their nationwide 
designated meeting nights as Tuesdays. I'm just lucky that so far the 
particular Tuesday of the month my local group of this organization 
meets has not had a collision with TriZPUG meetings on fourth Tuesdays. 
Is there opposition to having Plone Jams on first and third Wednesdays?

I will caution that any night we pick, there will be some home 
basketball games during which parking on campus will be non-existent, 
even if you get here early. Parking would then be best found in the Bank 
of America deck on Rosemary Street. I think they charge $3 flat rate in 
advance in the evening. Home games on first and third Wednesdays occur 
on Dec 19 at 9pm, Jan 2 at 8pm, and Feb 2 and 9pm. That last date is the 
Duke game.

If you can voice your concerns or agreements in short order, I can make 
a repeating reservation for the room starting Wed. Nov 7 at 6pm.

Also, the next TriZPUG meeting will be on Nov 27 at 7pm in 328 Phillips 
at UNC-CH. You are encouraged to speak up and tell us what you would 
like to present. For my part, I would like to spend a little time 
showing you why I've become a convert to KSS and update you on the 
latest KSS developments. KSS is Kinetic Style Sheets. It brings a super 
simple CSS-like domain-specific syntax to doing Ajax applications 
without having to know any Javascript. Think of it as Grok for Ajax. It 
currently works in Zope2, Zope3, Grok, and Plone. It's being brought to 
Django and Pylons and soon the rest of the world. It currently works 
with Prototype, MochiKit, Sarissa, and JQuery and has a plug-in 
architecture to allow it to accommodate other Javascript libraries like 
Scriptalicious. To learn more see http://kssproject.org/ (which is 
undergoing re-org).

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway
http://www.seacoos.org
office: 332 Chapman Hall   phone: (919) 962-4323
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599